A Country That Got The World’s Attention Poem by ali habash

We multiply by a bomb
Then we bear another.

We drag our children into passport documents.

We multiply far from the bedroom
And spit on our wedding day -
never paying attention to the tears.

On the TV screen
Baghdad storms us with bridges
Carnage of the Al Hadidi* fell in the Tigris -
It disappeared, taking refuge in the gulf

And I became a refugee on buses and newspapers.
I shake

At the first border check point
And I shake

When I hear the news
And I shake

Is there a lorry big enough for me,
For a passer by,
Who exchanged the capital of Al Rashid with a sea?

We’re farther from the wheels of the Mongols,
The black tea
And the darkness of Baghdad.

But the newsreader
Was still shooting at us with his news
While smiling.


* * * * *

The strangers
Ask me about the war.
No one asked me about the shrapnel that blasted the window,
The wardrobe where my dreams had heaped
Amongst metallic coins.


* * * * *

Baghdad
Is climbing another graveyard,
And I am like a cigarette between two fingers,
Standing far from her walls

Vomiting my dreams on a pavement in Damascus -
The smell old friends.

Friends who’re working in deception with joy
And the papers urinated on others.

Is homeland a terrace on a tanker
that treads on my dreams everyday
On Al Rashid street?

Or is homeland a dynamite freight
That brings joy to the children?



Jebla / Al Latheqiya 2007




* Al Hadidi: is the bridge of Sarrafiya in Baghdad. It was made of metal and was bombed in 2007.